DEM-Changing Faculty through Learning Communities

德怀特·洛克工程学院和德克萨斯A&AMP理工学院M大学将开展一个示范项目，旨在通过学习社区改变教师的知识、个人愿景、承诺和与学生的互动。该项目将帮助教师改进四个战略学科，这些学科支撑着改善女性、代表不足的少数群体和所有学生的学习环境：1)发展和邀请--教师成员研究女性和男性在智力和动机方面发展的机制。理解邀请在发展过程中的作用。2)心理模型--教职员工理解并明确他们如何从可观察到的数据通过假设到行动建立推理链。3)个人愿景--教职员工提高他们的想象能力，并以最大化个人自我实现的方式采取行动。4)个人承诺--教职员工提高他们的能力，从创造个人愿景转向认识到他们有权和责任实现它。大学校园学习环境的关键要素是教职员工；因此，以学习者为中心的教育环境的发展有赖于帮助教师发展为这种环境提供基础的心理和人际关系学科。改变对待女性的方式、管理教室的方式、执行教学的方式、指导研究生的方式，都有赖于众多个别教职员工。然而，大学校园并不类似于神经网络，神经网络可以通过反向传播方法等算法反馈定量误差测量来进行训练。相反，大学校园更类似于复杂的适应系统，在这个系统中，多样性、相互作用和对众多复杂因素的选择产生了可观察到的、新出现的特性。如果目标是创造既更有吸引力又更受欢迎的学习环境，那么只靠像这样的信息轰炸教职员工是不够的。或者“欢迎光临！”相反，重要的是确定应该在整个教职员工中培育和发展的学科，并坚信，如果教职员工实践这些学科，他们将创造出具有吸引力和受欢迎的学习环境。随着教职员工对这四个战略学科的精通，该项目应该观察到对学习、教学以及女性和少数族裔在SMET中角色的态度的变化。该项目还应观察到，该项目赞助的讲习班和教师学习社区的参与度不断提高。最后，该项目应观察到留住本科物理科学和工程专业女性的情况有所改善；研究生学习的入学率有所提高；物理科学和工程专业毕业生留住女性的情况有所改善。

The Dwight Look College of Engineering and the College of Science at Texas A&M University will conduct a demonstration project aimed at changing faculty knowledge, personal vision, commitment and interactions with students, through learning communities.The project will help faculty improve four strategic disciplines that underpin improvement of learning environments for women, underrepresented minorities and all students:1) Development and invitation -- Faculty members examine mechanisms through which women and men develop intellectually and motivationally, and understand the role of invitation in the development process.2) Mental models -- Faculty members understand and make explicit how they build chains of reasoning from observable data through assumptions to action.3) Personal vision -- Faculty members improve their capacity to imagine and act in ways that maximize their individual self-fulfillment.4) Personal commitment -- Faculty members improve their capacity to move from creating a personal vision to recognizing that they have power and responsibility to realize it.The critical element of learning environments on university campuses is the faculty; therefore, development of learner-centered educational environments rests on helping faculty develop the mental and interpersonal disciplines that provide the foundation for such environments. Changing how women are treated, how the classroom is managed, how teaching is performed, how graduate students are mentored, all depend on numerous individual faculty. However, university campuses are not analogous to neural networks that can be trained by feeding back quantitative error measurements through algorithms such as the back-propagation method. Instead, university campuses more closely resemble complex adaptive systems in which diversity, interaction and selection of numerous and complicated agents gives rise to observable, emergent properties. If the aim is to create learning environments that are both more inviting and more welcoming, it is not sufficient to bombard faculty with messages such as "Be inviting!" or "Be welcoming!". Instead, it is important to identify disciplines that should be nurtured and developed across the entire faculty with the conviction that if faculty members practice these disciplines, then they will create learning environments that are inviting and welcoming.As faculty members become more proficient in the four strategic disciplines, the project should observe changes in attitudes about learning, teaching and the role of women and minorities in SMET. The project also should observe increasing participation in the workshops and faculty learning communities sponsored by the project. Finally, the project should observe improvement in retention of women in undergraduate physicalscience and engineering; improvement in the enrollment in graduate study; and improvement in retention of women in graduate physical science and engineering.